SHADOWS BEFORE
I
Springtime in New England! Not all the giant factories with belching
smoke, not all the dingy tenements, billboards, hot-dog stands and
filling stations could conceal the fact that something magical
was happening to the land. Even to prisoners in jail, there was a
difference in the air which crept through the corridors. Just as boys
know when to fly kites, with no outsider to remind them--so Nick Sacco
knew it was time for the garden to be spaded, and when you went to see
him, he would ask who was going to do it, and what was to be planted.
It was good form to insist that he would be out in time to weed the
garden, and to eat the first tomatoes.
Vanzetti, who spent fifteen and a half hours in a cell with only a slit
in the top for light, and worked in a yard blackened with coal dust and
smoke of near-by factories--even he knew that it was spring. You took
a bunch of mayflowers when you went to see him, and the guard could
not refuse to let you give him one. A pitiful thing, a frail blossom,
but--“flower in the crannied wall”--it was a symbol, it meant a whole
springtime; it meant those beautiful woods about Plymouth, and the
walks which Bart had taken with Nonna and the children. “How happy we
been, Nonna! We not know what happiness we have, till we los-èd him!”
He would talk about the things they had done and seen; it was all
alive in his memory, it came like a vision, shining with a light that
never was in any springtime. He fed his soul upon such memories, lying
through the long hours in his cage. Friendship, kindness, beauty--he
had had these “blassings” in his life; not a full share--but then, he
had observed that people who had a full share did not appreciate so
much their “blassings.” “Plenty people go in sunshine, they not think.
But I got little time for seeing, I make notice!” He would move nearer
to the window.
Betty had occasion to go to Plymouth, and she brought back Beltrando
Brini in her car with her. Another kind of springtime, a musical talent
putting forth buds! The little boy came to the prison, and after
Cornelia had interceded with the warden, he was brought into the big
reception room, and unlimbered his fiddle and tuned it up. Bart sat
watching every move, bursting with pride, as if he were the child’s
mother. Trando was scared, of course, for he was only thirteen and a
half, and this was a terrible place, slouchy brown figures gliding here
and there, watchers with hard faces and eyes. But he tucked the fiddle
under his chin, and quavering notes stole on the air--“When you and I
were young, Maggie”--the tune which Bart had heard him struggling to
play, back in those happy days at home!
He had learned other tunes now--“Old Black Joe,” and “Home, Sweet
Home.” He could almost play Drdla’s “Serenade”--he would try it, if
Bart would excuse mistakes; Bart sat with tears running down his
cheeks, no use trying to hide them. The convicts stole to the doors
of their cells and strained their ears; even the hard-faced keepers
listened, and were reminded suddenly that they, too, were in jail,
victims of the hatreds they themselves engendered. All the prison drew
together, realizing its shame; the steel bars were melted--and the
harder and tougher moods which had made the steel. Oh, man, how strange
a fate--to make jails for yourself, and be led out by a little child
with a magic wand--and then find yourself afraid, and obliged to run
back and shut yourself in! A clock struck, and visitors must leave, and
magic cease.
II
Such holidays of the spirit were rare in the life of Cornelia and Betty
these days. For the most part their talk was about harsh reality. The
trial loomed near, a portentous event, a battle of armies; no longer a
mere matter of two wops accused of crime, but a contest over the good
name and dignity of the august Commonwealth. A lawyer had come from
the wild west and opened an office and started a propaganda campaign,
slandering the good name of Massachusetts all over the world. He was
raising tens of thousands of dollars--no one could say how much, but
they guessed high, and every dollar was a separate outrage and insult;
a refusal to play the game according to the rules.
Lee Swenson knew the danger into which he had put his clients by the De
Falco procedure, and this thought was a goad which gave him no rest.
He was a cyclone of energy; writing circulars, or suggesting ideas
for others to write; printing appeals, getting lists for mailing,
writing to this person and that, to get information, to pull wires for
publicity, money, or support; interviewing witnesses, hunting up new
ones, probing this or that detail of their lives. He would come out to
dine with Cornelia, and sit in her big Morris chair by the window, and
fan himself and sigh with exhaustion; but in a few minutes he would be
telling about a new idea, and before long something else would pop into
his head, and out would come his notebook, and what was supposed to be
a memorandum might turn into a new set of campaign plans.
Another lawyer had come, a friend of Swenson’s from the west; Fred
Moore, an Irishman, but a radical, and Swenson’s aide in many a fight.
Also there were two more journalists on the staff, John Nicholas Beffel
and Eugene Lyons, devoted young fellows, passionately convinced of
the justice of the cause, and writing newspaper and magazine stuff
that went all over the world. As an investigator, there was Bob
Reid, a Boston constable, gray old veteran who had been through the
Ettor-Giovannitti case with Swenson, and could follow the trail of
the authorities like an Indian hunter. If there was anything about
Massachusetts police practice too dreadful for Cornelia to believe, all
she had to do was to ask this man, and he would cauterize her doubts.
And then another figure, still more alarming to a lady who had lived a
sheltered life; a figure out of the underworld, furtive-eyed, silent--a
man whom Swenson or Moore usually saw alone, and with whom they made
mysterious appointments. Lee, it appeared, was going to try the “stool
pigeon” methods of the authorities. Somebody had actually committed
the South Braintree crime, he insisted, and the Bridgewater one, too;
the way to nail down the prosecution was to find the guilty men. A
rumor had come to Lee that in a city not far away from Boston there
was a gang of real bandits who were driving an automobile which they
called, jeeringly, “Sacco’s car.” Now the lawyers were spending money
to trail this gang, and Cornelia began to hear whispers of dread names.
Lee Swenson saw himself playing the “lead” in a fifth act, in which the
prosecution would be confronted with the real evidence, so overwhelming
that truth would be vindicated and justice done.
Lee was much of a boy, in spite of his forty years, and he managed to
communicate this excitement to Betty and Joe and Cornelia. But he found
it impossible to get the Italians of the committee to share his idea;
as in the De Falco case, it was contrary to “filosofia anarchica.” When
you argued about it, you would meet shrugs of the shoulders; let the
cops do their own dirty work. “We no raise money for sooch job.” When
you declared that here might be real bandits, there would be a still
higher shrug of the shoulders, a wider sweep of the hands. “What if
they did? Is poor feller, musta live. Is victim of wicked sistema, what
right I got for punish?”
And when you took the question to Bart and Nick, you met exactly the
same response. They would not be saved at the expense of any other
human being; they would not compromise their principles, even to prove
their innocence. The business of anarchists was to end the system of
exploitation, after which crime would cease of itself. If you could
live according to these principles, all right, then live; if you could
not, then it was up to you to die. Such stubbornness was embarrassing
to persons of Yankee upbringing, who believed in adjusting means to
ends, and took “law and order” seriously. Also embarrassing to a
lawyer, who had spent twenty years training himself to play a certain
game, and now was expected to play it and not play it at the same time!
III
Day by day, as the work continued, the intricacies of the case
developed. The list of witnesses for the prosecution numbered more
than fifty, those for the defense close to one hundred. There were
not investigators enough to run down all the clews, there were not
cells enough in the human brain to hold all the details. The crime
had occurred in mid-afternoon, on a busy street, and there were many
witnesses, each one a separate problem; the more you dug into him or
her, the more extra problems you would discover--husbands, wives,
sweethearts, children, employers--to say nothing of policemen and
investigators and prosecuting officials who had been there before you!
The witnesses were mostly persons of low social station, the neglected
poor of America. To probe into their lives, to uncover their family
skeletons, their vices and secret shames, their greeds and fears and
vanities and hates--it seemed to Cornelia there was nothing so horrible
being done in all the world. Except, perhaps, the work which a large
force of Americans, guided by sentimentality and superstition, were now
performing in France; digging up the dead bodies of soldier boys who
had been slain in battle, and had been rotting underground for three
years.
Take the soul of Lola Andrews. Cornelia lived with the soul of Lola
Andrews for months, walked, talked, ate, slept, dined or fasted with
Lola Andrews; because Betty took Lola for her task, consecrating her
youth and beauty, her social charm, her faith, hope and charity, to the
task of trying to persuade Lola to tell the truth. Naturally Betty,
being new at the practice of psychopathology, not very well informed
as to the diagnosis and treatment of hysteria, paranoia, hyperesthesia
and all abnormalities, would bring her problems to Grannie, and the two
would hold long consultations, and Cornelia would visit the famous Dr.
Morrow and ask his advice.
Lola Andrews had begun life in the wilderness of Maine, as the hapless
child of an Italian man and a Yankee farmer’s daughter. Her mother
died, her father disappeared, and she grew up, slim and small, black
of eyes and hair, a kind of woodland sprite, used to the sneers of the
world. At the age of seventeen, when she was married, her hair was
such a mat of filth and vermin that her husband had been compelled to
take her to a barber and have her head shaved close. This husband was
a soldier returned from the Philippines; after a child was born, Lola
began running out to dances, and he left her. During years of misery
she made the discovery that by screaming and crying she could get
people to pay attention to her; so she became an hysteric, and at any
time during the investigation, if anything happened that Lola didn’t
like, up would go her hands and forth would come a shriek. After which,
she would calm down, and talk quite reasonably about her own interests.
At the time of the South Braintree crime Lola had been taking care of
an elderly man who was bedridden, in the hope that he would leave her a
part of his property at his death. Meantime, since he gave her nothing,
she scrubbed floors, she went out and did washing--and of course was
preyed upon. The police of the town knew about her life, yet in this
case they would be willing to make use of her.
It was Lola’s story that she had been walking down the street, four
hours prior to the crime, and had twice passed what she thought was the
bandit car. It was a great weakness of the prosecution that the crime
had taken place at such speed, there had been only a minute or so for
observation; but here was Lola, who had stopped and chatted with the
bandits. One of the two men standing by the car was yellow-haired--and
when Joe Randall heard this part of the story he said, “Look out, Lee
Swenson, they are after you!” The other man had been under the car,
doing something to the works, and this was the one Lola had made a
special point to observe, and was willing to describe in any way that
seemed most to the advantage of Lola.
So here was a problem in applied psychology; to explore the dark
caverns of this tortured soul, to know more about her than she knew
about herself, so that you could pull the strings and manipulate her
to the ends of “joostice.” But alas, it was easier to dream than to
accomplish; the science of psychopathology is still in its infancy, and
the few months’ time allowed was insufficient to bring it to maturity.
Lola would have moods of frankness; she was nearing forty now, her
charms were gone, she was a poor wreck, and this was her chance to get
what was coming to her; the world was a place of “dog eat dog,” and why
should she worry about a pair of wops who would never worry about her?
Why should she worry about what she had said at preliminary hearings,
or to newspaper reporters, or investigators, or any of the other people
who had pestered her? All she had to do was deny it, and the district
attorney would protect her, and the jury would believe her.
There was a secret spring by which the soul of Lola might be moved,
but alas, the defense did not find it until after the trial. The
fates so willed it, that everything that was really significant in the
Sacco-Vanzetti case was not found until after the trial. Lola’s son
was living up in Maine, under another name, and in the effort to keep
his esteem, she would make sacrifices--for a few days. When confronted
with this son, and his reminder of other cases where she had “staged
a show,” Lola broke down and admitted that she had lied, and that her
identification had been “framed.” She made affidavit to this in the
presence of her son and several reliable witnesses. But under police
pressure, she took it all back, and made another affidavit, with a
lurid tale about how the defense had intimidated her. Subsequently she
took that back also.
Such was Lola Andrews, who sat in the witness chair at the trial, and
identified Sacco as the “dark-complexioned man” who had been under
the car, and identified the car as the bandit car because, “when I
heard of the shooting I somehow associated the man I saw at the car.”
And when the defense started to question her about her past life, she
suddenly threw her much-tried fainting stunt, and Judge Thayer hastened
to adjourn court. When she was asked the cause of her excitement, she
said it was because she had recognized in the court-room a man who had
assaulted her in a toilet in Quincy! And Judge Thayer, who had no more
training in psychopathology than Cornelia and Betty, ordered all the
doors of the court-room closed, while the officers attempted to catch
the man whom Lola had recognized. Never had she had so much attention,
never had she been such a heroine!
Along with this problem came Mrs. Campbell, the elderly woman who had
been with Lola on the day of the crime, and had gone into the shoe
factory with her to seek a job. It took fancy detective work to locate
Mrs. Campbell, because she was not listed by the prosecution; when she
was found, the reason was apparent--she completely wiped Lola out.
The man they had spoken to was not the man under the car at all, but
a man in khaki clothes standing near the factory; neither of them had
spoken to any man who was working on an automobile. An investigator for
the government had come to Mrs. Campbell, and hearing her story, had
assured her there was no need for her to come to Dedham to testify,
what she knew was of no importance, and it would cost too much money to
bring her. It would have added ten or twenty dollars to the seventy
thousand which the great Commonwealth was spending to put two wops out
of the way.
A topsy-turvy world, a lunatic’s dream of a world, impossible to
believe in, even when you saw it with your eyes and heard it with
your ears! What could you make of a world in which you studied Lola
Andrews for months, and came to know every quirk of her fantastic
soul; in which you saw her exposed and discredited by witness after
witness--even a policeman and a newspaper reporter to whom she had
admitted that she did not see the faces of the men she thought were the
bandits; and then, in the face of all this, you saw the Honorable Fred
Katzmann, district attorney of Norfolk County, stand up to address the
jury, and solemnly declare: “I have been in this office, gentlemen, for
now more than eleven years. I cannot recall in that too long service
for the Commonwealth that ever before I have laid eye or given ear to
so convincing a witness as Lola Andrews!”
IV
And then Carlos Goodridge! This man, the manager of a small music
store, had happened to be in a pool-room near the scene of the crime.
There were four other men in the room, and none of them had got a
glimpse of the bandits, and to these others Goodridge had admitted that
he could not identify the bandits. “If I have got to say who the man
was, I can’t say.” But seven months later Goodridge and his wife were
in court, charged with stealing several hundred dollars of money and
goods from the music store. It so happened that Sacco was there at the
same time, pleading to some motion, and Goodridge saw his opportunity,
and told the authorities that he recognized Sacco and could identify
him as one of the South Braintree bandits. Could a deal have been made?
Impossible to say; but the case was “placed on file”--that is to say,
Goodridge did not have to serve the sentence for his crime, but took
the witness stand and swore to the guilt of another man.
And here was Lee Swenson, insisting to Cornelia and Betty and Joe that
the prosecution would be able to “get away” with that! Judge Thayer
would find some trick of the law to bar all testimony to the effect
that Goodridge had a sentence hanging over him; he would send the
jurors from the room while the matter was argued, so they would never
know they were listening to a criminal. Lee insisted that the only hope
would be to “get something else” on that fellow! Lee’s instinct, what
he called his “smell for crime,” told him that Goodridge had been in
jail. But where? And how to prove it?
It was a matter to which the lawyer hung on with bulldog grip; they
must follow this clew and that, they must get more investigators, spend
more money. But they had only a few weeks, and the right clew came
too late! After the trial they knew all about Carlos Goodridge--his
real name was Erastus Corning Whitney, which in itself meant that he
had committed perjury when he testified against Sacco. He had served
terms in Elmira Reformatory and in Auburn State Prison, New York, and
was now wanted in that state for grand larceny. He had had a number of
wives, and Swenson collected a string of affidavits from these ladies,
setting forth his habits of marrying under various names, of stealing
everything in sight, and of lying freely. One added that he had been
attacked by Italians whom he had cheated of their belongings, and had
borne a grudge against Italians ever since.
Too late! Too late! The curse that lay upon the Sacco-Vanzetti case,
that everything came too late! When the only thing you could do was
to make another motion before Webster Thayer, and have that just and
upright judge respond, “Motion denied!” Lee Swenson and one of his men
tracked “Goodridge” to the little village of Vassalboro, Maine, and
confronted him with his record, and he held out his wrists for the
handcuffs. Later they had him arrested, but--strange solidarity of the
rulers of America--New York State did not want him now, could not be
persuaded to take him! When once a criminal has obliged the police in
any part of the country, he has become a member of the gang, and is
immune.
And stranger yet, the august judiciary will rally to his defense, and
not permit him to be slandered by having his criminal record exposed!
Webster Thayer, a Daniel come to judgment, would hand down his decision
on the motion for a new trial, rebuking the defense for its pursuit
of Goodridge, and saying that he had done right to resist a lawyer’s
efforts to intimidate him. “Motion denied!”
V
Too late! Too late! Several times, in the midst of investigations for
South Braintree, they turned up evidence concerning the earlier case.
Evidence which would have saved poor Bart, if only it could have been
got to the jury! New witnesses--Yankee witnesses--who had seen the
Bridgewater shooting, and declared that the bandits did not look like
Vanzetti! Witnesses who had stated this to the police, and been told
to go home and keep quiet! Now this case was legally dead; Vanzetti’s
friends could not even have the poor pleasure of bringing the new
evidence to the attention of Judge Thayer. No matter what happened at
the coming trial, Bart would stay in Charlestown prison fourteen more
years--save in the unlikely event that Massachusetts might elect a
governor with a heart.
So now Cornelia heard those ghostly voices which on past occasions had
shouted to her in vain! If only she had waited until that family which
was away from home had come back! If only she had turned up this street
instead of that! And of course these vain regrets brought terrors for
the future; Cornelia and her friends began to hear, far off and faint,
the ghostly voices warning them about the new case. They were like
enchanted people in an old-time legend, living halfway between two
worlds, holding communion with both. Lee Swenson, sitting in Cornelia’s
big chair, with his chin in his hand and his heavy brows knitted in
thought, became some medieval magician, wrestling with spirits and
demons he challenged, but could not command.
_Creature of Flame, thou shalt not daunt me!
’Tis I! ’Tis Faust! Thy peer I vaunt me!_
Many things this new Faustus demanded of the “busy spirit that ranges
round the world.” Find the man with a bullet hole in his overcoat!
Again and again this clew turned up; there had been a man by the name
of Roy Gould, who had been fired upon by the bandits, and the bullet
had pierced his coat. But nobody knew this man’s address. Manifestly,
the police would not have overlooked such a witness; and the fact that
he was not listed by them made it sure that he had failed to identify
Sacco and Vanzetti. Presently it was learned that he was a salesman of
shaving paste; some one reported that he was in the habit of selling
his wares to crowds at circuses and fairs, so it was a question of
getting a list of all the circuses in New England!
Like all others, this mystery was solved too late. The man turned up,
several months after the trial. The bandit car had passed within five
or ten feet of him, and the bandit who was supposed to be Sacco had
fired at him, and he said it could not possibly be Sacco. He would go
down into history as the “Gould motion”; one of nine different appeals
for a new trial, which would compel Judge Thayer to repeat nine times
his celebrated formula, “Motion denied.”
Also the witnesses who were to refute Louis Pelzer, a shoe cutter and
dullard who had been in the Rice and Hutchins factory when the shots
were fired, and had run to the window, and then dropped down out of
sight. He had really seen nothing and had so stated to many persons;
but the prosecution was to get hold of him, and drill him for a star
witness. Deep in the soul of this Jewish boy was a reverence for
authority, the buried memories of a hundred pogroms, when his ancestors
had cowered in ghetto tenements and seen whole families brained
before their eyes. When a blue uniform appeared in the room, when a
prosecuting official frowned upon him, something inside Louis Pelzer
gave way.
So he was going to say that one of the bandits was the “dead image”
of Sacco; he would learn this phrase, and repeat it as often as
desired. And where were the witnesses to break him? Three of them,
fellow-workers, would be found by the defense; but the most important
of them would be found too late. Four months after the trial, Louis was
to make an affidavit, declaring that his testimony was false, the words
“dead image” had been put into his mouth by the district attorney. Six
months after that, he was to take it all back, and be safe with the
police again!
But most loudly the ghostly voices shouted about the Pinkerton
reports. The operative “H.H.” had been on the scene immediately
after the crime, and his reports wiped out the most important of
all the witnesses of the prosecution, Mary Splaine. Not merely had
she identified other men, but she had told stories to the Pinkerton
operative which in themselves discredited her. And all this was known
to the prosecution--but not a hint of it to the defense! Most amazing
circumstance of all--that detective was going to attend the trial, and
take the stand and testify against a defense witness! Henry Hellyer,
the “operative H.H.,” came to the court-room where Mary Splaine swore
away the life of Sacco, knowing what she had told him, and what he
had written and turned in to his employers! The mockery of it--the
devilishness of it--that prosecuting authorities would play such a
trick! And the ghostly voices would shout into the ears of Cornelia
and Betty and Joe, and no one of them would hear a sound! Lee Swenson
might sit with his chin in his hand, and bend his brows and torture his
wits all night--but the “busy spirit that ranges round the world” could
never be conjured to give him a hint of that secret!
VI
There was a fatality hanging over Cornelia. She had seen it coming--no
way to stop it, yet she had pushed the thought away and refused to face
it. But now the trial was only a week off, and there could be no more
evasion. Lee Swenson telephoned, asking if he might come to dinner that
evening; he wanted to be alone with her, he said--and she knew the time
had come.
Lee looked very tired; there were deep lines about his mouth, and deep
shadows under his eyes, and he hardly tasted his very good dinner. For
a while Cornelia managed to divert him--asking for the news. A curious
development in the case, ready-made for a detective romance: from a
scrubwoman whom he had befriended, Lee had learned that detectives had
hired the janitor of his tumble-down office building to deliver the
contents of his trash-basket every night! He knew that they had their
minds fixed upon the sixteen thousand dollars which they thought Sacco
had buried; so the lawyer would divert his tired mind by drawing maps
of buried treasure! He made a plot of Sacco’s garden: sixteen feet
north from the southwest corner, twenty-two feet east--then dig! The
next time Cornelia went to Stoughton, she must find out if anybody had
done so!
Dinner was over, and the maid dismissed, and the doors closed; the
clouds came back to the lawyer’s face. “Nonna,” he said, “we are going
to lose these boys!”
“Oh, Lee!” Cornelia’s voice almost failed her.
“They have got us sewed up in a strait-jacket.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Do you realize what lies ahead of this trial? We start on the day
after Memorial Day, and then comes the anniversary of Belleau Wood, and
then Bunker Hill Day, and before we get through it will be the Fourth
of July! And all these dead soldier boys they are bringing home, all
the weeping and praying and dedicating our lives to our country!”
“What has that got to do with it?”
“You ask me seriously? This is going to be the great peacetime service
for heroes to render to the nation; a defense of our heritage against
foreign anarchy and Bolshevism. And what have we got? Very few Yankee
witnesses! A string of wops--worse than at Vanzetti’s trial!”
The lawyer began to count on his fingers--the scores of witnesses
he had been able to find. On the day of the South Braintree crime,
Bart had been selling fish, and digging clams and bait in Plymouth,
and had met few Yankees. He had stopped and chatted with one Yankee
fisherman--but the jury would say this fellow had got mixed up on
the date. Bart had bought some cloth from a Yiddish peddler, of whom
Katzmann would make a monkey. For the rest, they would have to depend
upon Alfonsina and Lefevre Brini, and Antonio Carbone and Angelo
Giadabone--hardly the sort of names to impress a Yankee jury!
As for Nick, he had been in Boston that day, but talked to only one
American he could remember. He had had lunch with Guadagni at Boni’s
restaurant, and later there had been two other Italians present; he had
paid some money to an Italian grocer, and then gone to the consulate,
to get his passport--but the man who waited on him there had gone back
to Italy, and all they had was a deposition, not very convincing to a
jury.
So much for the alibis. And then for the identifications; what
perversity of fate that so many of them depended upon wops! Why did
it have to be that Goodridge had been working for an Italian at the
time of the crime, and that his former employer was also an Italian?
And the men in the pool-room, to whom Goodridge had declared that
he could not recognize the bandits! Such names as Magazu, Arrigoni,
Mangoni, D’Amato! And then a bunch of men who had been working on a
trench in the street when the bandit car passed; a whole gang who
would testify that they had seen the bandits in the car, and that
none of them resembled Sacco or Vanzetti. But what good would it do?
“It’s just no use to put on a string of Italians, Nonna--three are
better than thirty, because you bore the jury and get them cross. Fred
Katzmann will make some playful remark--‘What is this, a Columbus Day
parade?’--and after that the jury will never stop smiling.”
There was a long silence. “Remember, Nonna, this means death for both
of them. There is no middle ground.”
“I know it, Lee.”
“And if we don’t win the verdict, don’t fool yourself about the future.
Remember, so long as Web Thayer lives, he stays the boss of this case;
the supreme court of Massachusetts has seldom reversed a verdict in a
capital case--only two or three times in its entire history. So it’s
now or never.”
“I know, Lee.” Cornelia’s voice was faint.
Again a silence. The lawyer’s somber look was fixed upon her, and she
could not meet it.
“Do you really want to save those boys, Nonna?”
“Of course I do!”
“Then why don’t you do it? Why not testify for them?”
“You told me you couldn’t use character witnesses.”
“I don’t mean that sort of witness, Nonna. I mean, why don’t you let
me fix you up a story, about how you went down to Plymouth on April
fifteenth of last year, and spent the day with the Brinis, and had
lunch with Bart, and later walked on the beach and saw him digging
clams? That’s the way to win this case, Nonna; it will end right
there--a knockout!”
VII
What was it--some instinct buried deep in Cornelia Thornwell, something
in the very fiber of her being, that made it necessary for her to be
shocked by these words--even though the idea had been haunting her mind
for months? Nothing really new that Lee Swenson could say to her--yet
she had to let him say it, and act as if she had never thought of it!
“Oh, Lee, I couldn’t do it!”
“Why couldn’t you? Did you really never tell a lie?”
“Never one like that!”
“Little ones, Nonna, for little occasions. But this is a big occasion!
This is life or death!”
Again a pause. When the lawyer resumed, his voice was grim, and he
dropped the playful nickname. “I am not going to try to put pressure on
you, Mrs. Thornwell, as I have on other witnesses in my life; for after
all, it is your case--Bart is your friend, far more than he is mine,
and why should I want to save him more than you?”
“Don’t put it that way, Lee!”
“But that is the way to put it! You have your friends, and you have
your principles, and you must weigh them, and decide which you value
more. We all have to make such choices--Bart made one, you remember, he
lied for his friends. Those lies he told in the police-station were to
save Boda and Orciani from sharing the fate of Salsedo. He will tell a
different story on the witness stand, and whether it is the truth or
not--judge for yourself!”
Another pause. “What is it, Mrs. Thornwell? Have you religious scruples
about an oath? Do you believe God will blast you to eternity if you
save these boys from the electric chair?”
“No, it isn’t that.”
“Is it patriotism? Do you think it will help your country to let a
bunch of crooks kill a pair of idealists, as a means of frightening the
others?”
“No, not that.”
“Then it’s just a matter of good form? It’s that you are a lady, and
such things are not done!”
“No, not that, either. As a matter of fact, they are done all the time.
My sons-in-law are lying in business, and they will lie on the stand to
back each other up.”
“Exactly!” And to himself Lee Swenson thought, “She has been debating
it with herself!” Aloud he said, “What is it, Mrs. Thornwell?”
“It is just--I wouldn’t know how to do it!”
“But if that is all that troubles you, here’s a thoroughly qualified
expert to take charge. Put yourself in my hands, as if it were a
surgical operation, and I’ll guarantee we’ll have Nick on the street
before the Fourth of July, and we’ll start a move to get Bart pardoned!”
“But Lee, how could I do such a thing?”
“If you mean it as a technical question, nothing more simple: you take
the stand and swear that you were in Plymouth that day, and you recite
the details of some other day when you were actually there. It can all
be worked out, very easily. You were in the habit of going there off
and on, nobody can dispute that. You remember the date, because of
something that happened the day before or the day after. Perhaps there
was a concert you had just been to, or there was to be one, and you had
to leave in order to attend it. We can go back and find a public event
to tie to; or perhaps you have a diary, or some letters.”
“But suppose I did something in Boston on that day?”
“There’ll be a way to get round it. You understand that, according to
your story, you only had to remember back three weeks. As soon as you
heard Bart was arrested, you naturally looked back, and realized that
you had been with him the day of the crime. But anybody who is going to
refute you has got to begin now, and remember back a year--which isn’t
apt to happen. If they have documentary evidence, like a letter--well,
the trial will be over a day or two after you testify. There might be a
scandal among your friends, but nothing serious, and anyhow, the boys
will be free--you understand that when a jury has acquitted them, they
can’t ever be tried for South Braintree again.”
VIII
Lee kept his promise not to put pressure on her. What he did was to go
over the case, telling what each government witness would testify, and
just how that testimony had been “made.” As a piece of prophecy it was
a miracle, but Lee claimed no occult powers. With bitterness he said,
“If I want to know what the other side is doing, I figure what I would
do myself.”
He had talked with some of these witnesses; others, who had refused
to talk to him, had become the subject of “reports.” So he knew their
motives, and how they would be controlled. When there had been need
of “rough stuff,” the police had done it. The more subtle work had
been done by college-bred gentlemen of the district attorney’s office,
who had learned to manufacture in weaker minds like Mary Splaine and
Frances Devlin what the psychologists term a “false memory.” They would
take these women to the jail again and again and show them Sacco and
Vanzetti; they would present pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, insisting
that these were the bandits, these were the men whom the women had seen
in the bandit car; until in the women’s minds the prison memories and
the photograph memories became superposed upon the bandit memories, so
completely merged with them that they could no longer be separated.
There were a thousand tricks that successful prosecuting officials
knew. They stood in with the political ring, they could promise
favors--contracts and business, a job for a man who needed it, immunity
from trouble with the police. “I am a friend of Mr. Jones, in the
district attorney’s office”--such a statement would tear up an auto
tag, or suppress a liquor charge any day. “It is what we call power,”
said Lee Swenson, “and those who hold it know how to use it.”
Like Virgil, leading Dante through successive stages of the infernal
regions, Lee Swenson conducted the widow of Governor Thornwell into
the interior of the Boston “ring.” He knew the way, because in the
Ettor-Giovannitti case he had had these forces to deal with, and
other lawyers associated with the case had “put him wise.” Indeed,
the factional quarrels in the political gang had been such that one
side had betrayed the other, and Lee had seen documents that would
have entitled leading statesmen to spend the rest of their days in
Charlestown prison. When you had listened to his stories for an hour or
two, you understood Lola Andrews’ statement that it was “dog eat dog”;
you forgot the Emersonian notion of making truth count in Boston!
Cornelia, probing her own soul, confessed to a certain snobbery in her
attitude toward perjury. It was a thing she associated with foreigners
accused of crime, and with Irish politicians. The City Hall belonged
to the Irish, so it was called the “steal works”; but the State House
with its golden dome was run by gentlemen, and was a sacred spot. Now,
however, Lee Swenson declared there was ten times as much graft in the
State House--the only difference was that it was legalized; such things
as fixing up laws to enable great corporations to plunder the public.
There under the golden dome you would encounter a blue-blood banker who
wanted his attorney made into a supreme court judge, so that the banker
would be safe forever after; or a state bank commissioner who wanted to
become president of a bank; a great lawyer who wanted to use his inside
knowledge of politics to plunder the clients of banks; a financier who
was lending money to legislators, who were passing bills to multiply
the value of his public utility holdings.
Cornelia understood all these references; Lee Swenson was attacking
the Thornwell family, undermining its claims to moral superiority. He
was pointing to scandals in which her family was involved--some that
were in the public prints, others that were whispered in the gossip of
the clubs. And she knew it was all true; she knew that Rupert Alvin
and Henry Cabot Winters and John Quincy Thornwell were busy right now
framing up their perjury in the Jerry Walker case. When an I.W.W.
lawyer hinted this possibility, she did not rebuke him. She did not
even protect her family dignity when he mentioned that her son-in-law
had begun his legal career as counsel for the Boston streets railways,
which meant that he had done most kinds of dirty work known to the
legal profession.
“Believe me, Nonna, I can tell you,” said the man from the wild west.
“I began with the Great Northern Railroad, and spent my time gyping
poor workers out of damages. I was paid five hundred a month, very nice
for a young fellow, and I had the way clear before me, right up to
the top, maybe a seat on the supreme court bench--that is how you get
there. But it made me sick; I couldn’t forget the faces of the men I
had robbed, and their pitiful wives and children. I just couldn’t look
at myself in the mirror. So I threw up the job, and went in to try to
help the workers; and what I saw--well, I have a simple formula, Nonna,
I don’t care what a man has done in the labor cause, he can never be so
guilty as those who take dividends of his sweat and blood.”
Said Cornelia: “Henry has talked to me a lot about the Sacco-Vanzetti
case, trying to drag me out of it. The next time he broaches it, I’ll
ask him about some of these matters.”
At which the lawyer smiled. “Well, get it straight. Don’t ask if he
pays bribes to witnesses; don’t ask if he ‘frames’ them. Everything is
done very carefully and decorously, in the office of a great Boston
lawyer. When a witness comes in he doesn’t see the chief, he sees a
young subordinate. The witness says, ‘I saw the man and he was wearing
a blue hat.’ The young lawyer interrupts him, ‘Oh, surely you are
mistaken, we have information that the man was wearing a red hat. Think
it over and see if you weren’t mistaken.’ He sends the witness away,
and next day the witness comes back, and meets another subordinate, and
says, ‘I saw this man and he was wearing a red hat.’ ‘That is right,’
says the young lawyer. ‘And he was walking,’ says the witness, ‘rather
slowly.’ ‘Oh, surely you are mistaken,’ says the lawyer, ‘we understand
he was running at top speed. Think it over and see if you don’t realize
that that is how it was.’ So the witness goes away, and next time he
comes he meets a third subordinate, and he says, ‘I saw this man, and
he had a red hat on, and he was running very, very fast’--and so on,
until he knows exactly what happened. So then he meets the chief,
and tells the chief what he saw, and the chief says, ‘That is a very
good witness, a dependable person.’ When he presents the witness to
the jury, he assures the jury this is a dependable person, and no one
can possibly say the great and famous lawyer ever did a dishonorable
action.”
IX
“Lee, I just _couldn’t_ do it!”--those were Cornelia’s parting words.
He answered, “Think about it,”--knowing well that she would think about
nothing else. Cowardice, weakness, false pride--she was willing to call
it any bad name, but there was something in her that stopped dead when
she tried to think of going upon the witness stand and swearing to a
made-up story. How could truth ever exist in the world, if somebody did
not stand by it?
Vanzetti came, as usual, to keep the midnight watch with her. “I
am poor wop,” said he. “But what you say if it was a Thornwell?”
Cornelia’s fancy played with that theme. She saw her daughter Alice,
in one of those ferocious quarrels which had marked the early stages
of her marital disharmony; with jealousy gnawing her heart, Alice
bought a revolver and shot Henry, and so was on trial, in danger of
the electric chair. But no, it was absurd, the electric chair was not
for Thornwells, there could be no such issue; they would adjudge Alice
insane, and put her in a sanitarium, take a year or two to “cure” her,
and then let her loose. But suppose, for the sake of argument, Alice
was in danger, and Cornelia had to take the witness stand. If she told
the truth her daughter would be executed, and if she lied her daughter
would go free. Which would she do?
Right was right, and wrong was wrong, people said, and it sounded
simple. But when you met a concrete case, you discovered that you could
not live by formulas. To refuse to do a lesser wrong, and thereby do a
greater--was that moral? On the other hand, if you said that the end
justified the means, where would you stop? Every man would be a law
to himself, and there would be chaos instead of order. There must be
rules, something men could count on. But the moment you said that, you
had a system, with high judges sitting on top, sentencing men to death
for the convenience of the Boston aristocracy. Cornelia remembered Mr.
Emerson, who had said that a good citizen must not obey the laws too
well.
The cruelty of the dilemma lay here, that what was supposed to be
justice was really class-greed. Bart and Nick were not going to be
tried because they had held up a payroll; they were going to be tried
because they were dangerous leaders of social revolt. That would be
the real motive power behind prosecutor, judge and jury; that would be
the thought in the minds of every one of them, at every stage of the
trial. The rest would be pretense, a cloak of propriety. And that was
the real lie--the real perjury: Fred Katzmann’s genial smile, veiling a
sneer; Web Thayer’s cold dignity, with a wink now and then to the jury.
When Cornelia remembered what she had seen in the Plymouth court-room,
it seemed to her that God would surely forgive any lies that served to
thwart such knavery!
So she swung back and forth, from one point of view to the other, never
satisfied with either. Lee Swenson said no more, but from that day his
presence was a question. Bart’s picture on the mantel-piece was a
challenge--what was friendship worth, it seemed to demand. You were not
asked to give your life for your friend, but only your ethical code;
your exclusiveness, your idea that you were something special, apart
from the harsh, rough world--in short that you were “Boston”!
From first to last Betty never spoke about the matter; and that was
surprising to Cornelia--it had the effect of putting her off by
herself, as if in a museum, or a mausoleum. Betty and Joe were bound
to have talked about the matter; everybody on the committee must have
thought of it. “Mrs. Thornwell could save our boys, if she would!” To
that Betty would make reply, “No use to put anything like that up to
Grannie, she belongs to the old generation.” Cornelia wondered, would
the new generation take the liberty of lying when it pleased? The issue
did not arise, because Betty and Joe had been in Europe, and could
hardly invent a special trip back, in order to be with Bart on the day
of the South Braintree crime!
X
If Cornelia could not face the thought of perjury, neither could she
face the other alternative. When she thought of the electric chair, and
Bart and Nick strapped into it--no, no, it was too horrible, it simply
_could_ not happen! So each skirmish in this war of conscience served
to start Cornelia into new activity. In spite of aching back she would
write more letters, in spite of tired limbs she would set forth to a
committee meeting, or to speak to a group of women, to assault the ears
of the heedless and drag them away from a bridge party to a murder
trial.
She had the idea now that she could help the cause by persuading
a group of ladies of good family to go to Dedham and watch the
proceedings. They would move to the town for a month, and invade the
court-room in a phalanx, and sit like the “tricoteuses” of the French
revolution, doing fancy work! They might frighten “Web” Thayer into a
semblance of impartiality, and possibly even restrain Fred Katzmann’s
crude wit at the expense of wops. The courts were supposed to be immune
to outside influences, but Cornelia knew her Boston too well for that.
In one way or another, several ladies of social standing had become
interested in the case. There was Mrs. Lois Rantoul, who was a Lowell,
than which nothing could be more impressive in a court-room. And Mrs.
Jessica Henderson, well-to-do--though she had hurt her social position
by getting arrested, along with Cornelia and Betty, the day President
Wilson had been welcomed to Boston. Mrs. Henderson and her daughter
Wilma had spent the night in that old Joy Street police station, and
had fed their blood to the vermin--a modern form of initiation into a
sisterhood of social justice.
And then Mrs. Evans, still earlier on the ground. Elizabeth Glendower
Evans was the widow of a young lawyer who had died before he had
ever had a case. She had become a charity worker, through youth and
middle age. Now she was gray-haired--and what a relief to Cornelia to
have some one else who was elderly and respectable, to help bear the
brunt of criticism! Mrs. Evans had got her social awakening during
the Lawrence strike of two years ago; she had gone, with others, to
see fair play, and instead had seen an unresisting striker felled to
earth by three husky policemen, and shoved into a patrol wagon like a
dead log. Next morning she saw the man, with head cut and plastered,
arraigned for assault, and she arose and told the court what she
had seen. Said His Honor: “Your testimony would be important if the
police were under accusation”--and thereupon he sentenced all the
strikers. Mrs. Evans spoke again, saying, “I go bail for all these
prisoners,”--which was very picturesque, and made a front-page story in
the papers.
“Old Boston” again, you see! She was a stockholder in the Lawrence
mills, which made it still more picturesque, and shocking to the mill
masters. To go to strike headquarters, and say to I.W.W. leaders, wops
and dagoes and guinneys and such riffraff, “I don’t know whether the
wages you ask are reasonable, but I do know that you are persecuted by
the authorities, and denied the legal rights to which you are entitled,
and to that extent I am with you”--to say that was to become, in the
columns of the press, leader of the revolution and commander-in-chief
of the picket line.
Now Mrs. Evans was interested in the Sacco-Vanzetti defense, and was
going to the trial at Dedham, to watch Web Thayer and Fred Katzmann,
and be horrified like everybody else. And maybe her testimony would
have been important, if Thayer and Katzmann had been on trial. But that
time had not come, and would not come for five or six years.
XI
Captain John Quincy Thornwell, Jr., Cornelia’s grandnephew, oldest son
of the president of the Fifth National Bank of Boston, had been an
officer in Battery A, the fashionable militia organization, in which
the young blue-bloods dashed about expensively. Tall, golden-haired,
haughty, he had looked so “fetching” in his fancy uniform that he had
fetched a wife who would some day own ten per cent of the electric
light industry of New England. “Captain John” was a director in his
father’s bank, a builder of airplanes, and of anything else which had
to do with killing--so sure of his own superiority he was.
Never would Cornelia forget the day when he and his unit had departed
for France. She had gone with the heartbroken young wife to see
them off; a dreadful experience--all the Boston blue-bloods there
in their expensive limousines, many of them stuck in a swampy field
alongside the Ipswich River, caught by a sudden deluge of rain, and
an ear-splitting thunderstorm; all social influence, all family
connections set at nought by the irreverent elements--it was quite like
being at war--blue-bloods actually struck by lightning and killed! And
these refined and delicately nurtured young Harvard men, dressed in
water-soaked khaki plastered with mud, standing at attention for the
“Star-Spangled Banner”; then struggling with exasperated horses, to get
very real and bloodthirsty cannon dragged out of mudholes!
“Captain John” had ridden off, like many others, forever; in the
desperate fighting in the Argonne Forest he had disappeared from human
ken. But in the process of digging up the remains of American soldiers
in France there was found a seal ring with one of the bodies, and this
ring was sent to Boston, and mentioned in the papers, and “Captain
John’s” mother went to inspect and identify it. So now the family had
a corpse in an air-tight coffin, over which to be publicly sentimental
for the glory of their country. A famous sculptor was designing a
monument, and meantime there were to be parades and muffled drums
and prayers and salutes--and one of the street intersections most
frequented by the wealth and fashion of Boston was to be christened
“John Quincy Thornwell Junior Square.” All over the city and in the
suburban towns they were doing this; so that future generations of
tourists would walk down Jones Street, looking for the corner of
Jones and Smith, and would be perplexed to discover that there was no
such place, but that a quite ordinary crossing with a drugstore, an
undertaking parlor, a grocery and a delicatessen shop, was known as
“Michael Callahan O’Grady Square.”
These ceremonies were to take place on May 29th, two days before
the opening of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial at Dedham; and the event
was the subject of a vehement discussion between the great-aunt of
the hero, and his cousin, Elizabeth Thornwell Alvin. Unthinkable
that any relative should fail to attend this ceremony! Cornelia was
going, because she was always hoping to keep peace with the family;
but Betty declared that she preferred to attend a circus, in a last
effort to trace the man with the bullet hole in his overcoat! When
Cornelia argued that “John did give his life for his country,” the new
generation answered, “Don’t talk like a legionnaire! He gave his life
for Father’s bonds. I didn’t want them and I’m not going to get them,
so I can’t see that I owe any reverence to my military cousin.”
“He is dead, Betty--”
“Exactly, and we aren’t helping him by parading behind his corpse.
We are doing it for our own glory, and especially for the young
fellows--so that when Father wants them to protect his bonds again,
they’ll think they are being glorious. It is vicious propaganda for
militarism, and if you who call yourself a pacifist do anything to help
it along--it will simply mean that you’re old and tired, Grannie dear!”
XII
Was it accident, or was it the playful malice of fate, that Memorial
Day fell on a Monday, so that the patriots had two whole days,
preceding the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, to rouse the population
against the Reds? On that Sunday and Monday it was estimated that
at least two hundred thousand Bostonians, one-fifth of the whole
population, took part in ceremonies. The governor and the mayor were
busy all day long, making speeches at breakfasts, luncheons and
banquets, with parades in between, and dedications and unveilings.
Senators and congressmen, councilmen and district attorneys took
a double holiday from stealing, and delivered eloquent praise of
the flag, and denunciations of its foes, the vicious and malicious
“radicals.” There was high mass in hundreds of Catholic churches, with
parades of the Knights of Columbus, and speeches by the biggest and
most successful rascals in Massachusetts. There were memorial services
in Forest Hills Cemetery, with nine hundred veterans of the Grand Army
of the Republic decorating graves. There were religious services in
Fenway Park, with veterans of three wars forming in Copley Square,
and loud-speakers installed so that huge throngs might hear. The Park
Street Church unveiled a tablet, with names of the members who had
given their lives in the World War. The Elks paraded, and had a bugler
sounding taps. The oldest veterans, too feeble even to put wreaths on
graves, were taken in launches, to strew flowers on the bay in honor of
the unknown dead.
All over the Commonwealth the same thing went on; no community too
small to have its heroes and its memories. Flag poles were set up and
monuments unveiled. Quincy, the largest city in Norfolk County, from
which the Sacco-Vanzetti jury was to be drawn, dedicated three squares
to its dead. One man had been killed in the Spanish War, another in an
uprising in the Philippines; many years they had spent in the land of
the shades without distinction, but now they were called up--on the
day before two anarchist bandits went to trial! The first Quincy boy
killed in the Civil War was resurrected for honors--sixty years he had
been forgotten! In Bridgewater, scene of the crime for which Vanzetti
was in prison, the remains of a World War veteran brought back from
France were buried with solemn ceremonials; in Braintree, scene of the
second crime, another body was buried, with the whole population in
attendance--a parade, and speeches by officials, with the selectmen and
other great persons standing by with bared heads. Another in Quincy,
another in Weymouth--with banners furled, and muffled drums, and
soldiers firing a salute over the grave.
A storm of patriotic fervor, a torrent of eloquence, in support of
America, and in denunciation of her foes; hundreds of thousands of
patient people, standing reverently in the spring sunshine; millions of
the same kind reading about it in editions of a dozen great newspapers;
and only one circumstance to mar the perfection of the double
holiday--the fact that the papers were obliged to print details of
several scandals then in the midst of exploding with a frightful stink.
The attorney general of the Commonwealth had just filed charges against
the district attorney of Middlesex County, just across the river
from Boston, charging him with having blackmailed a group of leading
moving picture producers of something over a hundred thousand dollars,
the price of immunity for a “Nero’s Circus” which they had held in a
roadhouse. The papers were full of lurid details about naked girls
dancing the highland fling; they said that several leading politicians
and criminal lawyers of Boston had shared in the loot.
Also the state bank commissioner was digging into the matter of the
bribery of legislators revealed by the recent bank failures; and it
was an embarrassing fact that many patriotic orators of this double
holiday had been sharing in such graft. The public did not know it,
but the orators knew it, so they pounded the rostrum, and waved their
arms until their faces grew purple and the sweat dissolved the starch
in their collars; the loud-speakers bellowed, and the parks and
public places, the churches and temples and banquet halls resounded
with sentiments of seraphic idealism, voiced by persons whose social
functions were those of hogs in a trough.
XIII
It was not so bad at the ceremony which Cornelia attended; because that
was Thornwell, and you may be sure the clan saw to it that no person
tainted with scandal did any orating at John Quincy Thornwell Junior
Square. The clan knew--for were they not the paymasters? The mayor of
the city happened to be a blue-blood that year--a rare interval of
respectability. And if the chief magistrate of the Commonwealth was to
go directly from the governor’s chair to the vice-presidency of one of
Rupert’s banks, and soon after having appointed two of Rupert’s very
good friends to the supreme judicial bench--well, that was a scandal
of such colossal proportions that it became respectable. Men could not
face the implications of it, so it was not discussed, except by a few
insiders, and members of the rival banking group, who knew what Rupert
was after.
A grand stand had been built, and flags and bunting made the
consecrated square into a child’s dream of peppermint candy. Lines of
ropes and policemen kept the throngs back; and there came “Captain
John’s” own Battery A, khaki-clad, with rumble of guns and tramp of
horses, and fluttering of pennants, red field, with figures in yellow.
And the infantry, known as the “Cadets,” in long blue trousers with
yellow stripes. There came a hundred Grand Army veterans, pitiful old
boys in every stage of decrepitude, carrying their tattered battle
flags, and wearing their faded blue uniforms, covered with medals and
decorations. There came khaki-clad veterans of American Legion posts,
and the Boy Cadets, their faces newly washed and shining. There came
automobiles full of great personages in braided broadcloth suits and
shiny top hats, and ladies in costly chiffons and new spring bonnets.
A beautiful show; with rolling of drums and blowing of bugles, and
standing up and sitting down again, and baring heads and bowing them,
while the rector of Trinity Church in the City of Boston offered an
invocation to the God of Battles, and His Son, the Prince of Peace. War
and Peace were thus mixed up in the ceremony, so that nobody could tell
at any moment which was which. The orators declared that the way to
insure peace was to prepare for war; upon which program the nations had
just led themselves into the greatest war to end war in all history,
and now were spending several times as much money to prepare for an
even greater war to end war.
It would be safe to say that in that vast throng of cheering and
singing and reverently listening people, these traitor-thoughts found
lodgment in only one head, that of the little old lady who sat in the
front row, among the highest of the high-up dignitaries. She, the widow
of a former governor, a Thornwell, and the great-aunt of the hero,
could not have been denied her proper place without making a scandal,
and emphasizing the dreadful rumors that she had been seduced by the
enemy within our gates, and turned into a friend of bomb throwers and
bandits. So nice to look upon, with her hair now almost white, and her
little round face much wrinkled, but still jolly, and her new spring
costume selected and presented by her daughter Alice of impeccable
taste; so gentle in manner, so quiet and ladylike--it was impossible to
believe what everybody knew about her, that she was actually going down
to Dedham the next day, and face all the uproar and notoriety, and lend
her sanction to the defense of desperate anarchists on trial for their
lives.
She watched with tears in her eyes, while her great-grandniece, the
little daughter of the dead hero, came forward to draw the veil from
the bronze tablet. The bugles blew, and the audience rose and bared
its head, and the bands started to play “America,” and everybody
sang--a sublime moment. The lovely young widow of the hero had to
hide her face in her hands, and even the stolid James Scatterbridge
and the cynical Henry Cabot Winters and the stately Rupert Alvin were
not ashamed to be moved. Cornelia’s tears were right and proper, and
she kept her traitor-thoughts to herself. No one guessed that she was
weeping for other heroes who were still to die. For the little boys in
their khaki uniforms, lifting their shining faces to the orators and
the beautiful waving flags! For the mothers who brought them there, to
be consecrated and pledged to future slaughters! For the great humble
masses who packed the streets in every direction, and stood bareheaded
and trusting, gazing up to the great ones, and believing every word the
loud-speakers told them!
A sharp division in that audience, between the many who believed, and
the few who knew. To the former the name America, and its symbol,
the flag, meant liberty and justice for all mankind; while to the
few it meant private property in land, machinery and credit, and the
exploitation of labor based thereon. By means of this system, the
knowing ones had brought the lesser nations and weaker peoples into
debt to them; so America and the flag meant battleships and guns and
airplanes and poison gas to collect this tribute to all eternity. That
was the reason these busy gentlemen took two days off from business,
and built stands and tacked up decorations, and set up loud-speakers
to carry the words of politicians and priests and preachers to crowds
in the public squares. That was why you heard no patriotic address
which failed to mention the “enemy within our gates,” the vicious
and criminal “Reds” who refused to love America and appreciate her
ideals, but wanted to overthrow the greatest government in the world,
and repudiate all the debts, and nationalize all the women, and make
America a vassal of what the orators called the “Bolshevikis,” or
sometimes, like Judge Webster Thayer, the “arnychists.”
BOSTON
_A Novel by_
UPTON SINCLAIR
VOLUME II
[Illustration]
UPTON SINCLAIR
STATION A
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA
COPYRIGHT · 1928 · BY
UPTON SINCLAIR
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
First and Second Printings
before publication